Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Over the period 1864–1866 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli computed the orbit of the Perseid meteors, and based on orbital similarities, correctly hypothesized that the Perseids were fragments of Comet Swift–Tuttle. The link between comets and meteor showers was dramatically underscored when in 1872, a major meteor shower ...
The earliest such stories tended to depict impacts by comets, [a] though other objects such as asteroids and meteoroids became more common in the 1900s. [2] Impact events from more massive celestial objects also appear on occasion. [ 1 ]
An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. [1] Impact events have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect.
The finding is unexpected because comets, not asteroids, are typically considered to "sprout jets and plumes". According to one of the scientists, "The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids." [103] Findings have shown that solar winds can react with the oxygen in the upper layer of the asteroids and create water ...
A meteoroid (/ ˈ m iː t i ə r ɔɪ d / MEE-tee-ə-royd) [1] is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are distinguished as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to 1 m (3 ft 3 in) wide. [2] Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust.
[2] [3] These bodies were originally designated main-belt comets (MBCs) in 2006 by astronomers David Jewitt and Henry Hsieh, but this name implies they are necessarily icy in composition like a comet and that they only exist within the main-belt, whereas the growing population of active asteroids shows that this is not always the case.
Comets whose aphelia are near a major planet's orbit are called its "family". [81] Such families are thought to arise from the planet capturing formerly long-period comets into shorter orbits. [82] At the shorter orbital period extreme, Encke's Comet has an orbit that does not reach the orbit of Jupiter, and is known as an Encke-type comet.
Antimatter comets and antimatter meteoroids are hypothetical comets and meteoroids composed solely of antimatter instead of ordinary matter.Although never actually observed, and unlikely to exist anywhere within the Milky Way, they have been hypothesized to exist, and their existence, on the presumption that hypothesis is correct, has been put forward as one possible explanation for various ...